the ghost of Michael Jackson

That first night when you get home you say "I'm losing it." So? I say. I'm losing it more. You say I definitely have it backwards, that in fact I'm the rookie prince of losing it, you its crown queen.

I say give an example. You cheerfully describe obsessing before you're even down the subway steps that morning that you've left the burners on. At the office you spend 7.5 hours in a fetal ball under your desk, missing three conference calls and an austerity meeting. What's more some visiting clients complain for not the first time about your screamed admonitions.

I reply that I called out sick and I've been sitting right here in front of the burners for the past 11 hours. I know they're off, I've been here all day trying to work up the courage to stick my head in the oven. It's when I lower the door to reveal the charred remains of my work computer and the still-smoldering severed head of Anderson Cooper that the game definitively goes to me.

A couple mornings later when you wake up you're shaking and I say what's wrong (skeptically) and you say you're worried about a comet hitting the earth, that it was in your dream right before waking up and now that you've woken up you're paralyzed in fear because all you can picture is gravity turning on itself and the earth breaking apart into free-floating fragments with people floating instantly into space looking at each other like what do we do dodging taxicabs and floating park benches at odd angles. I say what a coincidence for you to mention that (planting a light and only half-patronizing kiss on your forehead).

I show you my list from the night before (when I couldn't sleep I was so excited about the prospect) of the next 100 known objects asteroid-or-larger that could significantly impact the earth. In accordance with the scale of potential impact for each I've drawn a large and brightly-colored adjacent smiley face in magic marker. I think I have you beat until you flatly assert (rubbing my shoulders like "Go get em, champ") that sometimes a dream is just a dream, there's really no way the earth could be destroyed by a comet or asteroid and the only way it really could be destroyed would be was if you left the burners on, thus triggering a chain reaction ending in the halt of life as we know it here on earth/possibly throughout the universe. Then you clutch my wrists (believing it nonetheless necessary to fight your dreamed inverted gravity) and the game goes to you.

It's close but Game 3 goes to me when I vow to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death by submerging myself completely in a tin drum full of scorpions (and all you have by way of rebuttal is three bound diaries filled line by line with the question "Can the burners become self aware and On themselves?")

I know you'll bring your A-game for the rematch and am not surprised late Wednesday night when you sneak onto Neverland Ranch, start four nice kettles of tea to boiling, and leave with the burners on. While it's possible that they'll remain that way in perpetuity, adding slow and murderous incremental heat to the universe -- that it's all your fault and that it's indeed now only a matter of time before the eschaton -- what's absolutely certain is that Game 4 has gone to you, because all I've got in response is a YouTube video in which I don whiteface and a velvet bathrobe and, purporting to be the ghost of Michael Jackson, beg anyone who will listen for forgiveness over an illegitimate Casio beat. For a moment there is hope as the video's comment thread grows contentious and views skyrocket. Said hope is dashed when a CNN Breaking News Alert reports a suspicious and all-consuming fire over a 200-mile radius with Neverland as its epicenter.

The argument on the biggest proof that God doesn't exist goes to me (found footage of alligators eating a kitten) over your "Because burners were invented without an automatic shutoff mechanism."

For Game 6, which has been announced as paper-scissors-rock, I play scissors; you kick me in the groin, shove me to the ground, stick a shiv in my gut, and mace me where I lay. In your eyes I see victory; in my peripheral vision I see the movers carrying the oven out of our apartment; from your whispering lips I hear "rock."

As I write, my love, you're in the kitchen, ruminating over the fine print to the microwave instructions. You always look so beautiful on the verge of articulating a new worry. Game 7 is tonight (if necessary).